Previously unpublished documents in archives in Europe and the USA show how Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service showed a insensitive disregard for its former agents murdered in German concentration campsA callous disregard by recruiting the Gestapo major responsible for their deaths as a consultant in Britain’s own post-war counter espionage activities against Soviet agentsResearch that shows not only how Britain recruited Kopkow, but also protected him from prosecution as a war criminalHistorically rich in detail with photographs of many of the characters involved On 27 May 1942, SS-General Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czech agents who were trained in the UK and dropped by parachute into Czechoslovakia. Heydrich succumbed to his wounds on 4 June 1942. Two days later, Gestapo Captain Horst Kopkow’s department at Reich National Security headquarters was given fresh orders. From 6 June 1942 until the end of the war, Kopkow was responsible for co-ordinating the fight against Soviet and British agents dropped in Germany or German-occupied territories. This new direction for Kopkow made his name. Within months, the ‘Rote Kapelle’ Soviet espionage ring was uncovered in Belgium whose traces went directly to Berlin and Paris. A new counter-espionage war began and agents caught would pay with their lives. In France and Holland, the Gestapo caught many SOE agents trained in Britain. By spring 1944, around 150 British agents had been deported to concentration camps. By December 1944, almost all had been murdered without trial and Kopkow was directly involved in these murders. Arrested by British forces after the war, Kopkow was extensively interrogated due to his counter-espionage experience. For the next 20 years, Kopkow was a consultant for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. 39 black-and-white photographs

One of WWII’s most daring Allied D-Day missions and the hunt for Hitler’s war criminals is brought to breathtaking life by award-winning, bestselling war reporter Damien Lewis. Award-winning, bestselling author Damien Lewis explores one of WWII’s most remarkable Special Forces missions during the Normany landings on D-Day—and the extraordinary hunt that followed to take down a cadre of fugitive SS and Gestapo war criminals. On the night of June 13th, 1944, a twelve-man SAS unit parachuted into occupied France. Their objective: hit German forces deep behind the lines, cutting the rail-tracks linking Central France to the northern coastline. In a country crawling with enemy troops, their mission was to prevent Hitler from rushing his Panzer divisions to the D-Day beaches and driving the Allied troops back into the sea. It was a Herculean task, but no risk was deemed too great to stop the Nazi assault. In daring to win it all, the SAS patrol were ultimately betrayed, captured, and tortured by the Gestapo before facing execution in a dark French woodland on Hitler’s personal orders. Miraculously, two of the condemned men managed to escape, triggering one of the most-secretive Nazi-hunting operations ever, as the SAS vowed to track down every one of the war criminals who had murdered their brothers in arms . . . all with Churchill’s covert backing. With Nazi Germany’s lightning seizure of much of Western Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for the formation of specially trained troops of the “hunter class.” Their purpose was to incite a reign of terror across enemy-occupied Europe. Churchill’s warriors were to shatter all known rules of warfare, taking the fight to the enemy with no holds barred. In doing so, the Special Air Service would be tested as never before during the pivotal D-Day landings, and the quest for vengeance that followed. Breathtaking and exhaustively researched, Churchill’s Band of Brothers is based upon a raft of new and unseen material provided by the families of those who were there. It reveals the untold story of one of the most daring missions of WWII, that not only had ramifications for the war itself, but lead to the most extraordinary and gripping of aftermaths.

This gripping and heartbreaking narrative is the first full account of an American woman who gave her life in the struggle against the Nazi regime. As members of a key resistance group, Mildred Harnack and her husband, Arvid, assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942, following a Soviet blunder, the Gestapo arrested, tortured, and tried some four score members of the Harnacks' group, which the Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra. Mildred Fish-Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on February 16, 1943, on the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler--she was the only American woman to be executed as an underground conspirator during World War II. Yet as the war ended and the Cold War began, her courage, idealism, and self-sacrifice went largely unacknowledged in America and the democratic West, and were distorted and sanitized in the Communist East. Only now, with the opening of long-sealed archives from Germany, the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI, can the full story be told. In this superbly told life of an unjustly forgotten woman, Shareen Blair Brysac depicts the human side of a controversial resistance group that for too long has been portrayed as merely a Soviet espionage network.

A CrimeReads Most Anticipated Book of 2020 A Padma Lakshmi Favorite Read of 2021 The captivating story of the valiant Noor Inayat Khan, daughter of an Indian Sufi mystic and unlikely World War II heroine. Raised in a lush suburb of 1920s Paris, Noor Inayat Khan was an introspective musician and writer, dedicated to her family and to her father’s spiritual values of harmony, beauty, and tolerance. She did not seem destined for wartime heroism. Yet, faced with the evils of Nazi violence and the German occupation of France, Noor joined the British Special Operations Executive and trained in espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance. She returned to Paris under an assumed identity immediately before the Germans mopped up the Allies’ largest communications network in France. For crucial months of the war, Noor was the only wireless operator there sending critical information to London, significantly aiding the success of the Allied landing on D-Day. Code-named Madeleine, she became a high-value target for the Gestapo. When she was eventually captured, Noor attempted two daring escapes before she was sent to Dachau and killed just months before the end of the war. Carefully distilled from dozens of interviews, newly discovered manuscripts, official documents, and personal letters, Code Name Madeleine is both a compelling, deeply researched history and a thrilling tribute to Noor Inayat Khan, whose courage and faith guided her through the most brutal regime in history.

This book tells the dramatic story of the recruitment and training of a group of German communist exiles by the London office of the Office of Strategic Services for key spy missions into Nazi Germany during the final months of World War II. The book chronicles their stand against the rise of Hitler in 1930s that caused them to flee Germany for Czechoslovakia and then England where they resettled and awaited an opportunity to get back into the war against the Nazis. That chance would arrive in late 1944 when the OSS recruited them for these important missions which became part of the historic German Penetration Campaign. Some of the German exiles carried out successful missions that provided key military intelligence to the Allied armies advancing into Germany while others suffered untimely deaths immediately upon the dispatch of their missions that still raise troubling issues. And based on declassified East German government files, this book also reveals that notwithstanding the US military alliance with the Soviet Union, a few of the German communist exiles betrayed the trust that the OSS had placed in them by working with a secret spy network in England that enabled its agents to receive top secret mission related information and OSS sources and methods. That spy network was run by the GRU, the Red Army military intelligence service. This is the same intelligence service that has just been cited by US law enforcement officers as having hacked into computers run by the Democratic National Committee and launched a social media campaign in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the dual loyalties of the German exiles later became known to the United States military, such knowledge did not prevent it from posthumously awarding military decorations to the men who led these missions. Until that day, no German national had ever been presented with such medals for their service to the Allied armies in World War II.

The first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context

During the Nazi regime in Germany, all police forces were centralised under the command of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The political police (Gestapo), the criminal police (Kripo), and the security service (SD) were all brought together under the RSHA umbrella in 1939, commanded by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich. Using RSHA in Berlin as the centre, the web of Heydrich’s control extended into every corner of Nazi-occupied Europe. British and American intelligence agencies tried to get to grips with RSHA departments at the end of the war, knowing who was who and what they did, relying on what captured RSHA personnel told them along with intercepted documentation. To provide Allied intelligence officers in the field with accurate knowledge, the Counter Intelligence War Room (CIWR) was established to provide this information and list further Gestapo, Kripo, SD, and Abwehr officials to be arrested and interrogated. The informative CIWR reports used here give a precise examination of the RSHA by department, some detailing how Nazi jealousies and rivalries were more helpful to the Allied war effort than the Nazi cause - a portrayal of how Nazi Intelligence agencies went wrong.